Designing Flexible Coordination Systems to Advance Individual and Collective Goals in Physical Crowdsourcing

Kim, Yongsung

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-jzyn-1t20

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Designing Flexible Coordination Systems to Advance Individual and Collective Goals in Physical Crowdsourcing

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Volunteer-based physical crowdsourcing systems connect individuals to make unique contributions to solve local and communal problems and enable new services. A key challenge in enabling such systems is attracting enough willing volunteers who can make useful contributions to achieve desired system goals. While most volunteer-based systems provide volunteers flexibility to attract more volunteers to make convenient contributions, it can be challenging to reach desired system goals with uncoordinated contributions. In contrast, other systems may direct volunteers to specific tasks to meet the desired system goals, but may fail to attract enough volunteers because they do not provide much-needed flexibility. To overcome such challenges, this thesis introduces the idea of \emph{flexible coordination} that combines the benefits of both approaches in providing flexibility and coordinating useful contributions. A flexible coordination system surfaces opportunities for volunteers to contribute that are within volunteers’ routines and that are useful for achieving system goals. Unlike existing approaches that direct volunteers to go out of their routines or change their routines to meet the desired system goals, a flexible coordination system allows volunteers to carry out their routines to maintain flexibility. In order to still collect useful contributions while maintaining flexibility, a flexible coordination system proactively suggests opportunities that are within volunteers’ routines but that are also useful in advancing the desired system goals. Using the idea of flexible coordination, this thesis introduces \emph{on-the-go crowdsourcing} systems that allow volunteers to just go about their days, focusing on their routines, and make convenient contributions that seamlessly fit into their routines but that are still useful for achieving desired system goals. To enable the idea of flexible coordination and the design of on-the-go crowdsourcing systems, this thesis introduces three technical frameworks: (1) \emph{Opportunistic Hit-or-Wait}, a decision-theoretic framework that surfaces opportunities for volunteers to make valuable, convenient, and coordinated contributions on-the-fly to improve the quality of service; (2) \emph{4X}, a technical framework for multi-stage data collection processes that determine effective data collection strategies by reasoning about volunteers’ dynamic changing state of interests and current knowledge about the world; and (3) \emph{Opportunistic Supply Management}, a decision-theoretic framework that identifies and surfaces opportunities across the entire community in a way that can optimize the desired balance between the experience of volunteers and the goals of the system. Taken together, these frameworks demonstrate we can design volunteer-based systems that provide flexibility to volunteers and coordinate useful contributions to achieve globally effective outcomes by following volunteers’ routines and surfacing opportunities at opportune moments when needs of volunteers align with that of a system.

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